Friday, October 14, 2016

After 40 years "coding" for race, attacking social equality with words like "freedom;" after 40 years of presenting liquidation, asset stripping, decertification of unions, assaults on wages, increases in poverty as "entrepreneurship;" after 40 years of torturing language and meaning (along with persons of darker colors) such that the empty-suit empty-headed Reagan becomes a "revolutionary;" such that ketchup becomes a vegetable, war is peace, ignorance is strength, looting is prosperity, destruction is development, abuse is entitlement; after 40 years of continuous and massive attacks on, and bullying of, the vulnerable, the impoverished, the gentle, the darker, and the female, the bourgeoisie have spawned something that embodies all 40 years, and all of them in a single package.

That's a big fucking orange chicken out there, and he's come home to roost.

In this particular case, the big orange chicken has separated the Republican Party from those it so assiduously courted, cultivated, embraced, applauded-- that peculiarly American combination of hedge-fund managers and nightriders; the wonderful admixture of bullies and financiers; the lip-locked group-grope daisy chain of christian fundamentalists, evangelists, landlords, admirers of the Confederate States of America, anti-evolutionists, faith healers, laissez-faire-ists, Ayn Randists--that whole panorama of property-holders, just 20 basis points, or less, ahead, or behind, of the spectre of bankruptcy.

Here's the skinny: The Republican Party, born in the overture to civil war, the 1854 passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, allowing the expansion of slavery into the new territories, now enters its death spiral as the overture to another civil war. If the Republican Party was created to clear away the obstacles to the accumulation of capital, and slavery was such an obstacle, it's self-shredding is determined by the obstacle capital presents to its own accumulation.

The party of Lincoln becomes the party of Trump; capitalists pretend to give way to landlords, "developers," knowing venality is never having to say you're sorry, and always saying "more."

How did we get here? We got here because Reconstruction was defeated. We got here because Jim Crow is always in office. We got here because of two world wars, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan.

We got here after the defeat of the 1974 strike wave in the US. We got here by the kindler, gentler wars against people in Panama, Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala. We got here via the Contras, via Irangate, via Ollie North and Fawn Hall; we got here via Phil Gramm, Greenspan, and Rubin; via Morgan and Stanley and JP and Goldman and Sachs and Mr. and Mrs.Bank of America.

We got here via big money embracing petty people, finding its perfect representative in petty people; we got here in the devastation of small towns, rural communities, and rural industry unleashed by--not NAFTA, and not China-- but by the double-dip 1980s recession of Volcker and Reagan.

We got here via anti-abortionists terrorizing women struggling to survive in a world without mercy.

We got here via the flag of a slaveholder's rebellion paraded about as a symbol of "popular" resistance.

We got here via the funding of terrorists, and terrorism, across the globe. What would you call white phosphorus, if not a weapon of terror?

We got here via senates, and parliaments; via state legislatures, and city councils, and county commissions.

We got here because of 1001 things, and more, and all those things are the relations of capital.

There's no going back.

We didn't get here because the big fucking orange chicken is "speaking lucidly" to or "addressing directly" unemployed workers; those who are almost homeless; those who make-up the working poor.

We didn't get here because professors and professionals thought there was/is significance to identity, to race, color, gender in the US.

We didn't get here because "white male workers were ignored" as if white workers might have any interest separate and apart from the interests of those oppressed, exploited, abused.

We didn't get here because some men dress like women, or some women dress like men.

We got here, in part, because our appropriate contempt for the politics of voting obstructed mobilizing, independently of all established parties, against the campaign to restrict the vote; against the attempts to disenfranchise poor people; black people; brown people; young people.

Most of all, we got here because this is where capitalism takes us; this is where capitalism gets us.

This is where it gets us, when we don't defend those who attack private property in the attempt to defend labor (see here).

This is where it gets us, and this is only the beginning. Once the Republican Party collapses, those coalescing around the big fucking orange chicken will move on to more organized assaults on those always, and already, assaulted, dressed to the 9s in their Trump Signature Collection brownshirts.